Squat, But Not Here

There were plenty of examples from the past year of Asian tourists in Jackson Hole finding trouble as a result of cross-cultural misunderstandings.

A lack of true wildlife in heavily populated Asian countries led to some visitors getting too close the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem’s not-always-so-docile megafauna.

There were tales of foreign visitors who didn’t know English filling their gasoline-powered rental cars with diesel fuel.

The scornful looks line-cutting Chinese tourists sometimes drew undoubtedly were a result of Westerners not understanding how things work when crowds gather a hemisphere away.

But perhaps the most unexpected consequence of the lingual and cultural barriers for Chinese and other Asian visitors who flocked to northwest Wyoming this year played out in the pit toilets around Grand Teton and Yellowstone national parks.

“Our maintenance staff was seeing basically broken toilet seats, especially in the vault toilets,” Teton park spokesman Andrew White said.

In all, about a dozen of the 42 vault toilets in Grand Teton park wound up broken this summer, he said.

What was happening, park officials discovered, is that tourists from Asian countries were squatting, with their feet on the lids, and the shuffling of legs bearing a body’s full weight was causing toilets to snap where the hinges connect the lid to the bowl.

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